A well-researched, if unpalatable, picture of a filthy city and the different factions fighting for and against reform using...
Victorianist Jackson (Walking Dickens’ London, 2012) demonstrates the unimaginable filth that permeated London during the 19th century.
During the industrial age, it was not just dust and smoke from factories that affected life in the city; in fact, 19th-century reformers felt that was just a part of life. London was plagued year-round by manure, ash, mud and rotten garbage, and the summer months, which “created their own obnoxious cocktail,” were especially bad. The generally accepted thought was that the source of sickness, including cholera and typhus epidemics, was miasma, the foul smell of degrading organic material. The sewers and cesspools of London continually overflowed, and while the “night soil” men pumped out waste and sold it for fertilizer, they couldn’t keep up with a population that increased sixfold in the period from 1800 to 1900. Finally, with Edwin Chadwick (1800-1890) leading the sanitary movement, a great sewer project was built to divert raw sewage and eliminate cesspools. The situation regarding ash and cinders ran into a similar problem, as dustmen sold the waste from coal fires to brick makers but couldn’t keep up with the population explosion. Reformers managed to curtail the output of smoke from the many factories, but the domestic grate of a “man’s castle” continued to fowl the air well into the 20th century. The author thoroughly covers the various pollutants plaguing the city, including the most prevalent in the early years: manure. London required 300,000 horses to keep the city moving, and their manure, mixed with ash and mud, created a vile substance covering nearly every street.
A well-researched, if unpalatable, picture of a filthy city and the different factions fighting for and against reform using class distinctions, gender inequality and horrendous poor laws. Jackson strongly warns us that the problem isn’t solved; the great sewer project is desperately outdated, and the “clean air” is anything but.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0300192056
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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